


Redacted

by orphan_account



Category: World War Z - Max Brooks
Genre: Gen, Identity Issues, POV First Person Canon, Yuletide 2011, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-21
Updated: 2011-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-27 08:01:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/293497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A deleted interview with a zombie from The Oral History of the Zombie War.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Redacted

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kynical](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kynical/gifts).



**[At the door one guard carries several machine guns, the other a Lobo. "Should be safe, but times like this, trust but verify's still good," the first explains, avoiding direct reference to the resident scientific curiosity. No one has offered me her name. Her existence has only come to light through what IJ Jose Villarosa calls "an accident" and the few government sources who admit she is not a tabloid invention call "a dangerous breach of human security". In life she looks as fragile as the girl she allegedly ate. Bandages wrap around all of her body except a few square inches of her face, like a mummy with one intent eye uncovered, and her voice implies throat damage.]**

Who's reading this time?

 **[I reassure her she may speak freely.]**

The psychs say that people transfer their fears onto the only living specimen of a zombie they'll ever see. When they ask me the same old questions, they all think I should sound more repentant or more stupid, as though I could make up for the entire fucking war with tears and babbling. Or like I could tell them the final truth that will solve all their problems. Do they think I chose to be bitten?

 **_Weren't you involved with the group known as the Coven of Rebirth?_  
**

Sure, I was involved with that mess. **[Snorts.]** I was part of the countergroup trying to convince the student pop that not all the activist types were crazy. If I was a bit into critique, they were floating in a sea of red ink they would gladly make from blood if we didn't stop them. Their line was something about the equality of the virus, its embrace of all cultures, look at how it empowered the poor, we should join the revolution. They honestly thought they'd be able to praise that sort of thing when they were moaning in the night.

Very much not my thing. Funny how none of them ever made it back to sanity.

It would be a lot easier for everyone if I never came out of the dark, but humans and zombies alike have this inexorable desire to do something. For one half of me it's staying alive. The other half is eating every 46-chromosomed thing in its path, but I don't think that's the interesting one. Every person on this planet has seen that half already.

How'd I go from mindless biting to lucidity? I have no idea what happened in my head. The psychs say I'm suppressing it; I'd tell them if I had any idea. All I know is at some point after the girl— I'm sure you've read that story in the Zombiok— I found a guy in a winter coat, his muscles hanging over some branches. They were decaying but still visible against the moss, and I knew what the coat was for. Walked into a base in Los Angeles hiding as much of my skin as possible under its remains.

I would have shot myself then, don't know why they didn't. They let me in when I said hello like they couldn't see my crimes. They found out later. Late enough. The part of me that wasn't zombie knew enough to protect itself: I put on that coat and looked at the old blood on my face in a forest pool, but none of me was thinking about why that blood was there until I was safe locked up with my meds and some brave man with a recorder. And I was scared, wondering if the other zombies wandering around knew I'd gone somewhere none of them ever reached, even before I did.

Why do I exist? The human race is no more than chemical accidents. My birth was an accident for a mother without money for Plan B, all those clinics shut down like someone anticipated the birth shortage. I had to crack a few bones open for luck to pay me any attention, so I wasn't one of those poor infant bodies out there in the California forests. And when life made one miracle in the zombie virus, why couldn't it make another to combat it? That's the reason I'm still here. They would put me on trial, if only to provide the justice of executing a zombie without the heat of war, but the government has higher priorities than keeping some people happy. If they ever didn't, they wouldn't have done something like Radeker, Rekeder, you know whatever they named it— wouldn't have put my university on the expendable list either. The world may be screaming in its sleep for memories of things like me, but if we rise again the scientists are going to want every drop of my zombie blood to stop the next generation from living Z War Two. They're dreaming of real Phalanx.

So here I am to save humanity from myself and all the bastards who don't know any better.

By the way, you should put down I'm **[name withheld for legal reasons]**. They're bipolar, I think, half the time they want to speak like I'm just another survivor of the war with an unfortunate condition, who can't be told much information about the war I survived, and half the time they're on dehumanization mode. At first I tried to make them call me my name. After you spend years locked up, trying to atone for something you barely remember doing, it just doesn't seem that important.

Can you imagine I used to be an activist? All those things we did prewar. Protests. I protested, marched, wrote to my Senator to tell my neighbors I wasn't a Chinese robot, like, I was a Chinese American. After someone slipped me Jose's first article I wanted correct, I mean, wanted to correct him I was a former zombie, but apparently it's like being a murderer. You can't be a past murderer even if you're not a recidivist cannibal. And he wrote I was a Chinese zombie. Born and raised in a two-story pink house near Connecticut with a white fence, three dogs, blonde Bratz dolls, the pretty autumn, everything. I don't think it's his fault. The papers wanted a story about zombies from China come full circle, and when my ancestral lands are still a White Zone, how can you blame them? It would be a delicious story were it true. I would read it again if they would let me.

Everyone who passes through here has called me their zombie. Half-Chinese half-zombie zombie. It sounds kind of affectionate.

 **_Passes through?_  
**

Even though they know zombieness isn't airborne, higher ups are still scared of someone becoming too familiar with me. It would be the Guizhou prison all over again, you know? Letting a live, or let's say undead, zombie back into the wild. I hear they're still clearing that fuckup. Or worse, they'll suffer a fit of conscience about the billions of zombies they bashed in during the war.

 **_You seem well-informed for someone allowed so little access to the outside world._  
**

I don't know many names, but I understand the trends of what's happening. Now and then someone slips up and says something important to the elephant. The zombie in the room.

 **_You've reconciled yourself to being called a zombie?_  
**

What else? At least part of me is in the word. I have some variant of the virus, and if my brain is as unrotted as the machines say it is, then I'm a zombie. No one except the bureaucrats no one's reading ever made a precise definition, you knew when you shot us, shot us on sight. I have to remember to blink. But I have the fluids to do it. Lots of things are like that, a bit of this, yet a bit of that, and somehow we all keep making decisions.

I wouldn't mind not having to reclaim that word. They haven't even figured out if I'm immortal yet. I wouldn't mind being the last representative of humanity on earth either.

 **_Do you think other zombies can regain sentience?_  
**

Damn, I can only hope not.

 **[Pause.]**

Are they still listening?

 **_I will have to copy my complete notes for Doctor Smith. This is version five?_  
**

Six. Five starts, uh. How does it go again?

It was one of my sisters in the Coven who first said we should kidnap the Dean's daughter. She had seen the outbreak in Oakland the night before, had one of those slow burns, and the army was abandoning us the next day...

**Author's Note:**

> Yuletide treat! All kinds of feedback are welcome and appreciated.


End file.
